Various Artists - Delta Sampler

Various Artists - Delta Sampler
Moreso than with most labels, press about Stroboscopic Artefacts draws attention to their mastering process. It's done by Artefacts Mastering, and it's often a creative approach, accentuating gravelly features in the mid-high range to an unusual degree. It's key to the SA aesthetic, displayed in Delta Sampler; that is, greyscale and saturated like the bleached whites of an overexposed black-and-white photograph.

Label head Lucy and mainstay Xhin team up on "LX1," where a metallic melange churns in the background and makes a motif with the uber-distorted toms which collapse in at the end of each bar, as a rough kick lollops and skips every so often. It never elevates to pounding, full-throttle territory, instead trudging along, with variations being subservient to its constant plod. Jonas Kopp's "M33," the smasher of the package, is urgent and again industrial. Crashing machines and rumbling bedrock make the background, with a suspended, degraded trance-like synth riff repeating throughout, dropping into a black hole at the track's break, and then building intensity afterwards with its filter opening and closing slowly.

With Berghainian tastes having been taken care of in fine style, respected veteran Inigo Kennedy and Isodyne pay attention to the (somewhat) warmer, more harmonic side of things, with dark, round analogue mid-bass sounds echoing around the stereo spectrum as a kick patters along, evading 4/4. Deep bass fills the firmament and morose pads sink again and again. Forward Strategy Group's "Inside the Shadows" is drone, with the desolate hopelessness and post-apocalyptic wastes of Godspeed You Black Emperor! put down in electronic form. Wide pads yawn, moan and quietly bawl, as chattering creatures snicker mischievously under the castle trapdoor. It floats and washes with all the majesty and slowness of a glacier; a dense one, made perhaps of black ice. Like the package, it represents the introspective, spidery and gothic artistry of the label.